Brevity in Paradise

Quick! You've got thiry-seven minutes and eleven seconds to tell a story. Make it artful and engaging, funny or fiendish or fantastic (or all three!). Tell us a tale that rivets our attention from Sentence One and builds to a shattering climax. Oh, and there's one more thing: Your story must mention marshmallows, Thomas Jefferson and the freezing cold of interstellar space. Go!That's what happens every Saturday morning, when the OC Writers Guild gathers to hone their craft. There's no telling what they'll be asked to write about-dinosaurs, Davy Crockett, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon-but those three random prompts make some of the cleverest micro-fiction ever to fill a notebook. And the fruits of their frenzy are available for the first time in this book. Because Orange County is not just the home of Disneyland and sun-drenched beaches. With tales of passion and pufferfish, heaving bosoms and high-topped shoes, doo-wop dancing and Sputnik and sassafras-the OC is the place to go for quality, random-topic fiction. Just don't take too long. Here in the land of the perfect tan, you can never get enough Brevity in Paradise.